Tiktok by @decolonizinglove, captioned: Reply to @jamiekristinsjourney opening up your marriage advice.
[beginning of transcript]
Okay, so usually when one partner is really apprehensive about opening up, usually this comes from an innate sense of fear. So you, as the other partner that wants to facilitate, it's important that you support their journey in this. You cannot by any means convince them, but you can support them.
How do you support them? Well, one thing you can do is you can ask them - what do they need in order to feel secure? At the bare bones of things, they might have, going through that process, you might realize that they need certain things to feel secure. And if you're able to fulfill those things, then that might make it easier for you to open up. And it might make it easier for both the relationship to be polyamorous.
Another thing that is really important is encouraging your partner to seek help, to seek advice. They might not want to at first, they might be very reluctant - but giving them these kind of...Facebook groups, or giving them some books, or having them just talk with other polyamorous people might help in kinda mitigating a little bit of their fears. They might have questions, they might have fears. But in all this process it is really about making sure that they feel safe to talk to you and to be vulnerable, to talk to you about their fears. Because if they don't feel that they are safe to do that, its gonna be very hard to get them to a place where you can actually open up the relationship.
It's also very important to note that sometimes opening up to a partner can actually break up the relationship. The other person wants to stay monogamous. Now, monogamous and polyamorous couples do exist in the world. And so, if that's the structure that you want and your partner cannot open up, maybe finding resources on Poly+Mono relationships, or finding people that have that relationship structure that can give advice.
The last thing that I wanna mention is if it is impossible to open up, your partner is very unwilling and you feel that this is the only way you can be happy - at some point you have to make the decision: is it worth it for me to continue this relationship if I'm gonna be exclusive and monogamous the rest of my life. Maybe it might be a hard decision to make, but it may be the right decision to leave that relationship and live a polyamourous lifestyle.
